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TORONTO — In a suite in the downtown Sheraton, the beer is flowing, the room is packed.

It’s Dick Dinelle’s Grey Cup party and he’s invited a few of his friends, more than a hundred of them.

Hosting a bash in the Grey Cup city has become a tradition. He has gotten the green light from his wife Gerri, who prefers to stay home in Ottawa. Getting an invite to the wingding he hosts along with Tom Vella is a big deal. There are guys with nicknames like Nugie, Gus, Smitty, Dutch, The Baron, Huggy and Stud.

It is Canadiana, a mosaic of the football-hungry citizens from urban and rural centres across Canada. There’s beer, 15 cases of suds on ice in tubs.

“It’s drop-by,” said Dinelle. “There’s still room to grab a beer. I’ve only run out of beer once and we didn’t really run out. My friend Tom had stashed away a case for the rest of the weekend.

“It got out of hand one year, 2007, in Toronto, where I was saying, ‘Who are these people and where did they come from?’ Some of my posters disappeared.”

The parties began in the late 1960s, starting when he left his door to his hotel room open. For a few years, instead of having a party, he attended corporate events, but missed the special atmosphere his bashes had created.

Hamilton’s Box J Boys are among the guests. It was the Box J Boys who slipped a sticker onto the Grey Cup one year.

“(The Tiger-Cats) were struggling in the late 1980s, early ’90s and we needed to do something to create a buzz,” said the Box J Boys’ Jason Allan. “So we moved behind the bench — into Box J. We’re a group of childhood friends and family.”

Then there’s the Cowtown Posse.

“This is a bonding with all of our buddies from across the country,” said Cowtown Posse’s Mike Salwach. “It’s almost like a family reunion.”

Dinelle, who went to his first CFL game in 1951 as a 10-year-old, has so many Grey Cup memories. He was sitting 12 feet away when Angelo Mosca and Joe Kapp went WWE on each other, minus the folding chairs, last year in Vancouver.

The 71-year-old Dinelle, a Rough Rider fan through and through, has been to 43 Grey Cups. He chatted with John Diefenbaker while waiting for an elevator.

“It’s the people. That’s what the Grey Cup is about,” said Dinelle. “We have something in common — the love of Canadian football.”

The licence on his Town and Country van reads Grey Cup. He got it in 2007.

“I couldn’t believe it was still available,” said Dinelle, who also puts a lot of time into his job as president of the Ottawa 60-Plus Slo-Pitch League. He lived in Toronto for 15 years, but kept his season tickets in Ottawa.

“I became a Hamilton fan over the years,” he said. “But they know when my team comes back (in Ottawa), the only time they will see me there is on Labour Day or when my team is playing them.”

On Sunday, Dinelle’s oldest daughter Lisa will go to the Grey Cup — her first one.

Dinelle can’t wait for kickoff.

“I like to see a good game,” he said. “I can count on one hand the games that were dull.”

And it’s likely even fewer of his legendary parties were anything on the wrong side of outstanding.